Lewis Howes is a New York Times best-selling author, 2x All-American athlete, keynote speaker, and entrepreneur. The School of Greatness shares inspiring interviews from the most successful people on the planet—world-renowned leaders in business, entertainment, sports, science, health, mental health and literature—to inspire YOU to unlock your inner greatness and live your best life.
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You keep ending up in the same painful relationship with a different face. The reason isn't who you're choosing. It's who they remind you of. Sheleana Aiyana grew up in and out of foster care, never met her father, and survived relationships she's lucky to have walked away from. Today she's the author of Becoming the One and the voice behind the Rising Woman community. She didn't heal by thinking harder. She healed by going into the body, into the nervous system patterns that kept pulling her ba...
You can't think your way into being a good parent. You heal your way there. Dr. Shefali Tsabary, the pioneer of the conscious parenting movement, has sat across from Lewis before, but this conversation lands at a moment that feels different. The world your kids are growing up in has changed, and so has what they need from you. She walks through what is really happening to a generation raised by algorithms, why boys and girls get hijacked in completely different ways, what waits for any boy left ...
Being smart might be the exact thing standing between you and the life you want. You can have every answer and still not have it, because manifestation was never about thinking your way there in the first place. Lewis Howes has spent thirteen years and nearly 2,000 episodes building The School of Greatness, and even with three New York Times bestselling books behind him, he still catches himself falling into the same trap he's about to break down for you. There are five specific shifts holding y...
The person you turn to on your worst day isn't the funniest or the smartest. They're the one who makes you feel understood. That skill has a name: super communicator. And according to research, it's not a personality trait. It's a set of learnable habits. The same way anyone can learn to read. Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. He spent years studying what separates the people we love talking to...
You're not just a people pleaser. You're running a survival response your nervous system learned to keep you safe. Most of us were taught that being agreeable, flexible, and endlessly giving was a virtue. Meg Josephson, a licensed psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestselling book Are You Mad At Me?, says that pattern is actually a trauma response, and it's running your relationships, your sense of self, and your inner world without you even realizing it. The fawn response is the ...
Every time you open your eyes, you're not seeing reality. According to the mathematics of evolution, you never have. Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and professor who has spent over 40 years building mathematical models of perception. His book The Case Against Reality makes one of the most unsettling arguments in modern science: your senses didn't evolve to reveal the truth. They evolved to hide it. Think of your body, your thoughts, your memories, and your entire experience of this worl...
You're not over-fat. You're under-muscled. That single reframe changes how you think about your weight, your energy, and how well you'll age. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, a fellowship-trained geriatrician and the founder of muscle-centric medicine, has spent her career arguing that we've fixated on the wrong organ. Obesity, insulin resistance, even cognitive decline don't start where you think. They start in your muscle. She breaks down why muscle is your metabolic currency, your body armor, and the clos...
You can spend your whole life chasing the thing you think will make you happy, and never once realize you were never built to catch it. That's the trap most high achievers live inside. Run faster. Earn more. Hit the next goal. The rabbit just speeds up. Peter Sage has spent decades coaching people out of that loop. He breaks human consciousness into four levels: To Me, By Me, Through Me, As Me. Most of us are stuck grinding in By Me, mistaking motion for meaning. He's lived the test, not just ta...
The #1 illness of our time has nothing to do with your body. Dr. Lisa Miller, Columbia University researcher and author of The Spiritual Child, has spent over a decade scanning human brains to understand how we're built for God's presence. What those MRIs reveal is both startling and deeply hopeful. You were not built for scarcity or isolation. Three specific circuits in every human brain light up when you connect to something greater than yourself, a bonding network, an attention network, and a...
The real mistake isn't spending too much. It's dying with money you never used. Bill Perkins built a career generating over $2.2 billion in trading profits as a hedge fund manager. His book Die With Zero reframes what money is actually for. Money is a tool, not a goal. Every dollar you hold at death represents life energy you spent earning it and never converted into something real. The question isn't how much you save. It's whether you're using your wealth, your health, and your time together, ...
You can earn half a million dollars a year and still have nothing left by the end of the month. That's not a theory. A Goldman Sachs study found 40% of people making over $500,000 are living paycheck to paycheck. The income isn't the problem. The identity is. George Kamel, #1 national bestselling author of Breaking Free from Broke and co-host of The Ramsey Show, has taken thousands of calls from people who earned great money and lost it all. People who confused looking rich with building wealth....
Your brain is making choices for you before you even realize it. Neuroscientist Emily McDonald, known as Emonthebrain, studies how your identity, nervous system, and subconscious programming quietly run the show. Most people think they're choosing. Research shows the neural pattern of a decision lights up in a brain scan before you're consciously aware you've made it. That's the gap Emily spent years learning to close. She grew up with clinical depression, ADHD, anxiety, and a victim mindset bak...
Not everyone is going to like you. And that is okay. Emmanuel Acho built one of the most meteoric rises in media in recent memory. Former NFL linebacker. Fox Sports host of Speak for Yourself. Author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including Illogical: Saying Yes to a Life Without Limits, published under the Oprah imprint. He has done things no one outside of Oprah herself has done. And still, the criticism came. This conversation is about what you do with that. How do you hold you...
You can be wildly successful and still be quietly falling apart inside. Joel Kinnaman has appeared in some of the most talked-about shows in Hollywood. He has starred in The Killing, Robocop, House of Cards, Altered Carbon, and is currently in his fifth season of For All Mankind. And he will be the first to tell you that none of that made the war inside his head any quieter. Before every live theater performance for three straight years, he threw up. He kept a bucket backstage. The negative voic...
Investigative journalist David Epstein reveals how having too many options often leads to paralysis, advocating for the strategic use of constraints to foster creativity and drive success. He introduces the BCS Press Release framework for batching work, clarifying commitments, and making decisions, drawing lessons from both business failures like General Magic and personal adversities. The conversation highlights the importance of deliberate focus, forgiveness, and strong relationships for achieving true greatness and happiness.
Most people learn how to love the hard way. What if you didn't have to? Faith Jenkins is a TV judge who has presided over more divorce cases than most people will ever witness in a lifetime. She has also been through roughly 10 serious relationships of her own, waited until 42 to marry, and did both pre-engagement and premarital counseling before saying yes. She knows this terrain from every angle. What she learned will shift the way you think about every relationship you are in or hoping to fin...
Clinical psychologist and "Sleep Doctor" Dr. Michael Breus reveals how understanding your unique chronotype and addressing the psychological and biological factors of sleep can dramatically improve your rest without medication. He shares a five-step daily framework, debunks popular sleep myths like the 8-hour rule and mouth taping, and provides practical tools like 4-7-8 breathing and the Napa Latte protocol to optimize sleep quality and overall performance. This episode emphasizes adapting sleep science to your real life for profound long-term health and achieving greatness.
Your effort isn't the problem. Your programming is. Lewis Howes spent years outworking everyone around him, and it still wasn't enough. He had the discipline, the results, even the New York Times bestseller. But inside he still felt like that broke kid on the couch who wasn't enough. That gap between outer success and inner peace is where this episode begins. Most people are running a mental operating system they never chose. The beliefs you hold about money, love, and what you deserve weren't d...
Every diet you've ever tried has failed you for one reason: it never told you when to eat. Your body runs on two energy systems. One burns sugar. The other burns fat. Most people never spend a single day in the second one. Around eight to ten hours without food, the switch flips. Ketones flood your brain. Hunger quiets. Mental clarity hits. Healing turns on. This is what fasting expert Dr. Mindy Pelz has been teaching for over 25 years, and what her book Fast Like a Girl made impossible to ignor...
Your money beliefs were locked in by the time you were seven years old. The patterns showing up in your bank account right now started somewhere in your childhood. And most of the financial advice you have been given is aimed at the wrong target. Financial educator Haley Sacks, a.k.a. Mrs. Dow Jones, author of Future Rich Person: The New Rules for Building Wealth, breaks down why obsessing over lattes and pre-chopped vegetables is a waste of your financial energy. Negotiating your salary, unders...
Most people don't realize they have a ceiling on their success. Not a skill ceiling. A preference ceiling. Brendon Burchard calls it the complexity ceiling, and it's the invisible line where your comfort wins over your vision. The highest performers in the world share one non-negotiable: their preferences never outrank their aspirational self. They don't wait to feel ready. They generate the feeling they need and act from that place. Brendon introduces his FREE framework (Feeling, Responsibility...
Graham Stephan was relentless about one thing before he had anything else: not spending money he did not have to spend. He calculated the gas cost of visiting a friend and decided it was not worth it. Most people would call that extreme. He calls it the foundation. The habits he built early, consistency, focus, and ruthless saving, did not feel heroic in the moment. They felt boring. But boring done every single day is what compounded into real estate commissions, YouTube income, and an investme...
Anita Moorjani did everything right. She ate organic, avoided sugar, studied cancer prevention obsessively. She still got lymphoma. That contradiction is the entire point. Growing up as an Indian woman in Hong Kong, caught between British culture and a community that valued sons over daughters, Anita learned one thing above all else: make yourself small and keep everyone happy. That lesson followed her for 40 years, through a canceled arranged marriage, a cancer diagnosis, and a four-year deteri...
Kevin Love has an NBA championship ring, five All-Star selections, and an Olympic gold medal. He also had a panic attack that changed everything. In this conversation, he gets radically honest about what it means to carry anxiety, rage, and childhood wounds into a life that looks like success from the outside. He talks about nine years of estrangement from his parents, the reconciliation that came just before his father died, and what becoming a father himself has taught him about what it means ...
Dr. Edith Eger was 16 years old when she danced for Josef Mengele at Auschwitz the same night her mother was sent to the gas chamber. She survived. And then she spent decades running from what happened until she finally turned around and walked straight back into it. What she found there changed everything. Edith teaches that freedom is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose. Again and again. By becoming your own good parent, facing what you have been carrying, and giving ...
Chloe Kim won her first Olympic gold at 17, became the most dominant athlete in her sport, and then quietly started questioning whether any of it made her feel the way she expected it to. She reveals that the greatest pressure she ever felt came not from the crowd or the competition but from internalizing the belief that first place was simply where she was supposed to be, making every win feel expected and every loss feel like failure. That belief quietly ate at her for over a decade, and unpac...
Ryan Leak shares powerful strategies for proactive living, radical generosity, and setting boundaries to navigate difficult people. He emphasizes finding peace in decision-making and understanding the difference between genuine giving and enabling. Leak also explores the importance of authenticity, letting go of the need to prove oneself, and aligning with a higher purpose to serve others and achieve true greatness.
In this inspiring episode, Pastor Michael Todd reveals how an unaddressed childhood wound fueled his drive for greatness, impacting his relationships and personal well-being. He explains why many struggle to find love due to presenting defended versions of themselves, not healing past traumas, and lacking self-love. Michael shares his journey of overcoming emotional eating and redefining success, highlighting that true fulfillment comes from aligning purpose with partnerships and consistently working on spiritual, physical, and emotional health.
Amy Purdy walked into an operating room at 19 about to lose both legs, and instead of collapsing into fear, she gave herself three goals before the anesthesia took hold. You know that feeling when life pulls the ground out from under you and every identity you had disappears overnight? Amy has lived that more than once, and what she discovered is that the challenges you most want to escape are actually moving you closer to your purpose, not away from it. The key is learning to lean into problems...
Dr Joe Dispenza drops a finding that most people are not ready for: a seven-day meditation retreat produces measurably greater healing than most pharmaceutical drugs, with 80% of participants expressing the same healing genes by the end. If you have ever tried to think positive and felt nothing shift, Dr Joe explains why that happens and what your body is actually doing instead. Most of us are unknowingly running 95% of our lives from subconscious programs rooted in the past, and our bodies quit...
